Friday, July 11, 2014

On June 25, 2014, Harga komputer rakitan's John Mueller made
a shocking announcement: Harga komputer rakitan would be removing all author
photos from Harga komputer rakitan search results. According to the MozCast
Feature Graph, that task was fully accomplished by June 29.

In this post I will:

Give a brief overview of how Harga komputer rakitan
Authorship got to where it is today.

Cover how Harga komputer rakitan Authorship now works and
appears in search.

Offer my take on why Author photos were removed

Investigate the oft-repeated claims of higher CTR from
author photos

Suggest why Harga komputer rakitan Authorship is still
important, and speculate on the future of author authority in Harga komputer
rakitan Search.

A Brief History of Harga komputer rakitan Authorship

The Harga komputer rakitan Authorship program has been my
wheelhouse (some might say "obsession") since Harga komputer rakitan
first announced support for Authorship markup in June of 2011. Since I am both
an SEO and a content creator, Harga komputer rakitan certainly got my attention
in that announcement when they said, "...we’re looking closely at ways
this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results."

Of course, in the three years since that blog post, many
search-aware marketers and content creators also jumped on the Harga komputer
rakitan Authorship bandwagon. Occasional comments from prominent Harga komputer
rakitan staffers that they might someday use author data as a search ranking
factor, along with Bill Slawski's lucid explanations of the Harga komputer
rakitan Agent Rank patent, fueled the fire of what most came to call
"author rank."

Below is a video from 2011 with Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson
explaining the possible significance of Authorship markup for Harga komputer
rakitan at that time:

During the three years since Harga komputer rakitan
announced support for rel=author markup, there have been many changes in how
Authorship appeared in search results, but each change only seemed to buttress Harga
komputer rakitan's continued support for and improvement of the program.

In the early days of Harga komputer rakitan Authorship,
almost anyone could get the coveted face photo in search by correctly setting
up Authorship markup on their content and linking to that content from their Harga
komputer rakitan+ profile. As time went on, Harga komputer rakitan became
pickier about showing the rich snippet, and some sort of quality criteria
seemed to come into play. Still, it was not too difficult to earn the author
snippet.

Then at Pubcon New Orleans in October 2013, Matt Cutts
announced that in the near future, Harga komputer rakitan would start cutting
back on the amount of Authorship rich snippets shown in search. He said that in
tests they found when they cut out 10% to 15% of the author snippets shown,
"overall quality went up." In December of that year we saw the
promise fulfilled as the percentage of queries showing author photos dropped,
and many individual authors either started seeing a byline-only snippet for
much or all of their content, or losing Authorship snippets completely.

It was clear by then that Authorship as a search feature was
a privilege, not a right, and that as much as Harga komputer rakitan seemed to
want people to adopt Authorship markup, they were determined to police the
quality of what was shown in search associated with that markup. But none of
that prepared us for what has happened now: the complete removal of author
photos from global search.

Harga komputer rakitan Authorship without Photos in Search

Here are the fundamental facts about how Authorship is used
in search as of this writing:

1. The only Authorship rich snippet result now available in
global search is an author byline. Harga komputer rakitan has dropped author
photos entirely (except for some unique exceptions in personalized search; see
below). Also, Harga komputer rakitan dropped the "in xx Harga komputer
rakitan+ circles" link that showed in some cases and led to the author's Harga
komputer rakitan+ profile.

authorship without profile photos

2. Author bylines now link to Harga komputer rakitan+
profiles. Previously, at least in the US, author bylines in search results
linked to a unique Harga komputer rakitan search page that would show just
content from that author. This feature is no longer available.

3. Qualification for an Authorship byline now is simply
having correct markup. This was a bit of a surprise given Harga komputer
rakitan's move last December to differentiate and highlight authors with better
quality content who publish on trusted sites. But in a Harga komputer rakitan
Webmaster Central Hangout on June 25, 2014, John Mueller indicated that now as
long as the two-way verification (rel=author markup on the content site linked
to author's Harga komputer rakitan+ profile, and a link back to the content
site in the author's Harga komputer rakitan+ Contributor To links) could be
correctly read by Harga komputer rakitan, a byline would likely be shown.

You can check for correct Authorship verification for any
web page by entering its URL in Harga komputer rakitan's Structured Data
Testing Tool. If Authorship is correctly connected for the page, you should see
a result similar to this:

eric enge authorship preview

However, it is well known that this tool isn't perfect. For
example, even though it shows Eric Enge's post on Copyblogger as being
verified, Harga komputer rakitan has never shown an Authorship snippet for any
of Eric's posts there, and even now does not show a byline for that content.
Eric is a very well-known and trusted author who gets a rich snippet for all
his other content on the web, and Copyblogger is certainly a reputable site.
Why his content there has never displayed an Authorship snippet remains a
mystery.

In the Hangout, John Mueller went on to say that in the
future they may have to reevaluate showing bylines for everyone who has correct
markup, once they get more experience with the byline only results. He promised
that there will be continued experimentation. If they see that people are using
the bylines as a gauge of how great or trustworthy an author is, that might be
impetus enough to try to re-implement some kind of quality factor into whether
or not one gets a byline.

So are there actually more Authorship results in search now?
If Mueller is correct that Authorship snippets are now based merely on a
technically-correct connection, and there is no longer any quality factor, then
wouldn't we expect now to see more Authorship in search, even if only bylines?
Not necessarily.

Moz's Dr. Pete Meyers shared the following with me:

So, in my data set, Authorship [measured the old way - by
thumbnail photos] peaked on June 23rd at 21.2% of SERPs (in our 10K data set).
Measured the new way [bylines only], Authorship is showing up around 24.0% of
SERPs. That could mean that, in absence of the photos, Harga komputer rakitan
has allowed it to appear more often, or it could mean that there were a handful
of SERPs with byline-only Authorship before. I suspect it's the latter, but I
have no data to support that.

I agree with Pete's latter guess. The fact is that from the
December 2013 "purging" of Authorship in search until the recent
change, there have been two kinds of Authorship results: Those with a photo and
byline, and those with byline only. I called the latter "second class
Authorship," and it looked like when Harga komputer rakitan ran its
quality filter through the Authorship results, most lower-quality authors
dropped to second class, byline-only results rather than being dropped
altogether from Authorship results.

So it appears that the net result is no overall change in
the amount of Authorship in search, just an elimination of a "first
class" status for some authors.

4. Author photos may still be shown in personalized search
for selected Harga komputer rakitan+ content. This was an unannounced change in
Harga komputer rakitan search that showed up at the same time author photos
were being eliminated from global (logged-out-of-Harga komputer rakitan)
search. Now Harga komputer rakitan+ posts by people you follow on Harga
komputer rakitan+ may sometimes show an author photo when you search while
logged in to your Harga komputer rakitan+ account (personalized search).

The example below is an actual screen capture from my own
logged-in search for "Harga komputer rakitan Plus for Business."
Joshua Berg is in my Harga komputer rakitan+ circles, and Harga komputer
rakitan shows his relevant Harga komputer rakitan+ post both elevated in the
results (higher than it would occur in my logged-out results) and with his
profile photo.

authorship in harga komputer rakitan+

In my testing of this, I have seen that these personalized
author photos for Harga komputer rakitan+ posts are most likely to show if the
author is high in the "relevancy" sort in your Harga komputer rakitan+
circles, and is someone with whom you have engaged fairly frequently.

While not Authorship related, it is interesting to note that
Harga komputer rakitan+ brand pages that you circle and have engaged with may
now show a brand logo snippet in personalized search for their Harga komputer
rakitan+ posts. While some other parts of the world have had these branded results
for a while, this is entirely new for US Harga komputer rakitan searches.

harga komputer rakitan authorship for brands

I'll have more below on what I see as the significance of
these new results and what they may say about the future of Authorship and
author authority in Harga komputer rakitan.

So Why Were Author Photos Removed?

So if Harga komputer rakitan was committed to continued
improvement of the Authorship program, why did they drop photo snippets
entirely? Was this a complete reversal, a "beginning of the end for
Authorship" as some thought? Or were author photos in search simply not
producing the results Harga komputer rakitan was looking for?

Before I give my take on those questions, I highly recommend
Cyrus Shepard's post " Harga komputer rakitan Announced the End of Author
Photos in Search: What You Should Know." I agree completely with Cyrus's
take there, and won't duplicate what he covered. Rather in the rest of this
post I will try to bring some added insights and informed speculations based on
my intensive observation of Harga komputer rakitan's Authorship program over
the past three years.

Let's start with the explanation given by John Mueller in
his announcement post, linked at the beginning of this article. John said:

We've been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design
of our search results, in particular creating a better mobile experience and a
more consistent design across devices. As a part of this, we're simplifying the
way Authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the
profile photo and circle count. (Our experiments indicate that click-through
behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.)

It sounds like Mueller is linking this change to Harga
komputer rakitan's "mobile first" initiative. Mobile first seeks to
unify, as much as possible, the user experience between desktop and mobile. It
is a response to the rapid increase of mobile usage worldwide. In fact, at SMX
West earlier this year Harga komputer rakitan's Matt Cutts said that he expects
Harga komputer rakitan searches on mobile to exceed desktop searches before the
end of 2014.

In subsequent comments on his Harga komputer rakitan+ post
and elsewhere, Mueller elaborated that images in search results take up lots of
bandwidth in mobile search, slowing down delivery of results on many devices.
They also take up considerable screen real estate on the smaller screens of
mobile devices.

But were UX and mobile concerns the only reasons for
removing author photos? I seriously doubt that. If author photos were providing
a significant benefit to searchers, according to Harga komputer rakitan's data,
then it is likely they would have worked on some compromise that would have
made them more compatible with mobile first.

Furthermore, John Mueller himself, in the aforementioned
Hangout, hinted that there were other considerations involved. For example, he
commented that there may have been too many author photos for some search
results, and that too much of any one feature in search is not a good user
experience.

My Personal Speculation. I don't doubt Mueller that demands
by Harga komputer rakitan's search user experience efforts may have been the
main driving force behind the removal of author photos, but as I said above, I
do not think it was the only reason.

I believe that after much testing and evaluation Harga
komputer rakitan may have decided that author photos for now send a
disproportionate signal to searchers. That is, the photos may have been
indicating an implied endorsement of result quality that Harga komputer rakitan
is not yet prepared to back up.

Remember that in December we saw Harga komputer rakitan
reduce the number of author photos shown in search as an attempt, according to
Matt Cutts, to increase the quality of those results. However, when questioned
about the concept of "author rank" (Harga komputer rakitan using
author trust data to influence search results), Cutts consistently speaks about
the great difficulty of evaluating such quality or trust. He elaborates that
finding a way to do that remains a strong goal at Harga komputer rakitan, but
he doesn't expect to see it for years to come. (For example, see my remarks on
his comments at SMX Advanced last month.)

Given all that, it may be that Harga komputer rakitan,
realizing that they still have a lot of work to do toward evaluating author
trust and quality to a degree where they would allow those factors to influence
actual search rankings, decided that even though Authorship does not currently
affect rankings, the photos still might imply to searchers a trust and
authority for the author of which Harga komputer rakitan could not be fully
confident.

In addition, I believe that three years into the Authorship
program, Harga komputer rakitan realized that they were never going to get the
vast majority of authors and sites to implement Authorship markup. If author
authority is to succeed as a contributor to better search results in the
future, Harga komputer rakitan has to find ways to identify and verify authors
and their connected content that are not tied to either markup or Harga
komputer rakitan+. That also will be a long-term project.

So this may actually be merely a temporary retrenchment as Harga
komputer rakitan knuckles down to the hard work of figuring out how to make
author authority something truly worthwhile in search.

What About Ad Competition? When the dropping of author
photos was announced, there was immediate speculation by many, including Moz's
own Rand Fishkin on Twitter, that the author photos were seen as too
competitive with the AdWords ads displayed in search.

rand fishkin on authorship

It's impossible to either prove or disprove such
speculation, as only Harga komputer rakitan holds the data. I personally find
it a little hard to believe that it came down to a zero sum game between author
photos and ads. In other words, is it reasonable to think that was either/or;
that author photos were so attractive and got clicked so much that when they
appeared too many people totally ignored the ads?

Also, that speculation is based on the assumption that
author photos were, in recent history, huge CTR magnets. In the next section
I'll examine those CTR claims.

What About Author Photo CTR?

One of the most oft-repeated alleged benefits of author
photos in search was that they dramatically increased click-through rates
(CTR), as people were drawn to those results even if they were lower on the
page.

I was as guilty as anyone else in confidently proclaiming in
my online articles and conference presentations that "studies have
shown" this increase in CTR for Authorship results. So it shocked me as
much as anyone when John Mueller in his announcement post said, "Our
experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered
design is similar to the previous one ."

First, we should note some ambiguities in Mueller's
statement:

He does not actually say "click-through rate,"
though that's what most readers assumed he was talking about. He called it
"click-through behavior," which could refer to other things, such as
how quickly people bounced back to the search results after clicking an author
photo result. In that case, higher CTR would not be a good thing from a search
quality viewpoint.

He does not explicitly say that the click-through behavior
was for the author photo results exclusively. It could be an evaluation of
overall click behavior on search pages that included author photos.

This could be a reference to click behavior aggregated
across all queries showing author photos. If so, then it may be that while CTR
was higher for photo results in some queries, overall the effect may have been
a wash.

But were we ever really sure there was as huge a CTR
increase for author photo results as was frequently claimed? After
investigating those claims, I'm not so sure.

Harga komputer rakitan themselves never made a positive
claim of increased CTR for author photos. A much-cited paper by Harga komputer
rakitan researchers on social annotations such as face photos in search was
based only on eye-tracking studies and user interviews, not actual click
behavior. It actually found that image-based social annotations were not
necessarily as attractive to searchers as believed, and only were attractive
under certain circumstances.

I found hundreds of blog posts proclaiming "30-150%
increase in CTR!" for Authorship. Those all seemed to trace back to one
article two years ago that cited a 30% increase of CTR for rich snippet results
in general. That post did not talk about Authorship specifically, nor was it
made clear exactly how they determined the 30% raise.

Most of the other articles or "studies" purporting
to show increased CTR from Authorship are based on one-off, anecdotal evidence.
In other words, the authors implemented Authorship, and then saw more organic
traffic to their sites. While interesting, such correlative claims at best may
demonstrate a one-off accomplishment for that particular author for particular
queries, but they do not prove that there was a general, or even universal, CTR
boost.

Testing for actual CTR boost is probably impossible outside
of access to Harga komputer rakitan's own data. That's because CTR is highly
volatile by ranking position, and it is impossible to know if you're comparing
apples to apples. For a truly conclusive test, one would have to be able to
randomly show the same result for the same query in an A/B split with half the
results showing an author photo and half not. I don't see any way for us to set
up such a test.

In the Webmaster Central Hangout mentioned previously, John
Mueller hinted strongly that whatever CTR boost there may have been, Harga komputer
rakitan has seen it wear away over the past couple years. He mused that it is
likely people became more used to seeing author photos in search over time, and
so they had less impact and drawing power. If Harga komputer rakitan sees a
feature not having much effect, it is natural that they would remove it.

Unfortunately, the Author Stats feature in Harga komputer
rakitan Webmaster Tools is no help in evaluating CTR of author photo results
vs. post-author photo results. Before June 28, for me it showed hundreds of
pieces of content showing in search as Authorship snippets. Since June 28, only
one result shows, and that is for a Search Engine Land article I wrote that
made it into Harga komputer rakitan News results, where author photos can still
show. Apparently the Author Stats tool was measuring only results with author
photos.

harga komputer rakitan authorship graph

All that is not to say there was never any rise in CTR for
any Authorship posts. But it is to say that we never really knew for sure, and
we never knew how much. Most importantly, there was never any proof that any
CTR boost was universal. That is, there was no reason to assume that just because
your results got an author photo, they were automatically getting a CTR boost.

So Does Harga komputer rakitan Authorship Still Matter?

In a word, yes. If Harga komputer rakitan had actually lost
its enthusiasm for and commitment to author identity as a future, important
aspect of search, then this would have been the time to pull the band aid all
the way off, rather than just removing photos. But, in fact, Authorship still
works in search.

Let me conclude with some reasons why I think Authorship
still has value, and that author authority is still a major priority for Harga
komputer rakitan search.

1. Authors still matter. The bylines are an indication that Harga
komputer rakitan still cares who created a piece of content, and thinks that is
significant and useful information for searchers. Every pixel of a search
result is very valuable real estate. Harga komputer rakitan realizes that, and
is still willing to give up some of that territory to an author's name.

2. Bylines are not invisible. Sure no one believes that a
byline might capture the eye of someone viewing a search page to the same
degree that a face photo probably did, but it does not follow that bylines are
without value. More and more SEOs are advising their clients to optimize the
meta descriptions for their pages. Why? Not because they are a ranking factor
(they are not), but because they can have a significant effect on
"selling" the searcher on clicking that result.

We're used to hearing that the number one result for a given
query usually gets the most clicks by far. But it doesn't get all the clicks,
and on some queries the top result may not be as attractive as on others. If we
all believed the top result was always the best, wouldn't we just click that
"Feeling lucky?" button on Harga komputer rakitan's home page?

The truth is that when the title of the top result doesn't immediately
grab the searcher as a sure thing to fulfill her search need, she will begin
looking for other clues in the other results. Among those will be the
descriptive text under the results. When an author's name appears there, it may
move the searcher to think the result is more reliable (written by a "real
person"). And if that person is someone already known to and trusted by
the searcher, the value goes up significantly.

3. Author and brand images now in personalized search. While
limited in appearance, the fact that Harga komputer rakitan now will sometimes
show an author photo or a brand image for Harga komputer rakitan+ content in
personalized search indicates that they have not at all abandoned the idea that
such image results can have value. It may be that they see that such highly-personalized
recommendations have real value to searchers. It makes sense that if I
regularly engage with Rand Fishkin on Harga komputer rakitan+, I will be more
likely to value his content when I do a logged-in search with a relevant query.

This may have implications for the future of author
authority in search in general. It is conceivable that even if Harga komputer
rakitan does implement it and expand it for content beyond Harga komputer
rakitan+ posts, that it will remain highly personalized. In other words, Harga
komputer rakitan may decide that it is most reliable to boost authors with whom
you already have some affinity.

4. Authorship still builds your author rank database with Harga
komputer rakitan. Using Authorship markup on your best content is still the
clearest way to let Harga komputer rakitan see what you create and how people
respond to it. You can be sure that Harga komputer rakitan has been tracking
such data all along, and will continue to do so. Even if author authority is
still not a ranking factor (outside of personalized search, and some search
features such as In-Depth Articles), it likely will be someday. When that day
comes, if Harga komputer rakitan has a clear history of your growth as a
trusted author in your field, you may have a competitive advantage.

5. Harga komputer rakitan remains committed to author
authority as a search factor. As recently as SMX Advanced in May, just a few
weeks before the announcement of the end of author photos, Harga komputer
rakitan's Matt Cutts reiterated his enthusiasm for author authority, while
noting that it was a difficult and long-term project. For a transcript of his
remarks, see my post here. Harga komputer rakitan understands that people are
wired to trust other people long before they trust "brands" or
websites.